Medium Length
We’re an ongoing experiment in readers’ needs.
Elsewhere in this collection, you’ve read articles by our authors and about what The Magazine is. But you may be curious, in an inside baseball sort of way, as to why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Origin story
The Magazine was started as an experiment in whether people would pay for a streamlined, cruft-free publication that came out at regular intervals with new content from writers who were paid reasonably well by industry standards. (We publish our rates, and wish more publications did.)
Its founder, Marco Arment, had spent years building and running Instapaper, and he knew how people liked to take an article from a site festooned with advertising and distraction and turn it into in a straight run of readable text with images and multimedia. He built a universal iOS app—which works on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad—to deliver that. I came on board around issue 2. He was ready after a dozen issues to move on to other challenges, and sold me the publication in May 2013.
I may own it, but the publication is a continuously iterated collaboration, which is why I slip readily into “we.” I’m the hub, but not the spokes: we have had dozens of writers take part, some appearing multiple times, along with illustrators, photographers, a fact checker for one very long feature, a regular contract proofreader, and a part-time managing editor, as well as advisers, an outside design firm, and an outside iOS programming team. I rely on these folks to make every issue happen, even if I’m pushing the “publish” button.
I hit the publish button every other Wednesday. That much I know.
We have had a well-defined mission: we publish an issue every two weeks that contains five medium-length features—about 1,500 to 2,500 words each—that center on subjects that will interest a curious audience that may have an interest in technology, but which are often not about tech at all. We’re trying to find unique stories or unique facets. We hope that what we create with our authors and artists is worth about 20¢ an article (two bucks a month or twenty bucks a year in subscription fees).
We take reader feedback seriously, but are not slaves to it. We like to keep a strong focus on narrative and storytelling, whether in reporting or personal essays, and some of that doesn’t appeal to some segment of our audience each issue. On average, we hope people find two to four of the five stories meet the mark. (All five is way too much to ask unless a reader has an extremely broad interest in everything.)
The Magazine’s format came out of decisions to accept constraints:
- The app relies on Apple’s iOS Newsstand, which had a number of benefits for publications at its introduction, some of which have disappeared in iOS 7.
- A discrete issue published on a recurring date in contrast to a continuously streaming set of new items.
- Many voices contributing primarily new material. (Since about issue four, it is all originally commissioned writing, with a couple of exceptions for “bonus” content.)
- No advertising. Marco felt from his Instapaper experience that attempting partial or full support via ads would be a difficult and uninteresting row to hoe. Instead, he wanted to see if enough subscribers could be interested to make it a going concern.
Marco, being a programmer, was able to devote his own labor to creating the app, and thus didn’t have to invest money in that part, which saved a small fortune. (It’s one of our ongoing cost advantages, too: we aren’t in debt for programming services ahead of revenue.) He only paid for design services and hosting, then writer fees, and, after launch and proving it profitable, me.
The Magazine succeeded quickly on a number of fronts: it was the first publication precisely of its sort, and received a lot of attention and many subscribers. It was profitable from its first month, and enough so Marco could bring me on nearly full time.
I bought it from him because it’s both the most enjoyable work I’ve ever had and because there are so many untold stories to tell.
I know what we do. But what are we?
A river runs through it
We don’t have to hit a deadline to send files (or in the olden days, bring laid-out “flats”) to a printer in order to have our stuff splattered onto pulp, cut, bound, and dropped into the mail or at your doorstep. That constraint is obviously gone.
But we still love the idea of an issue and a publication date, and readers clearly do, too. The idea of having a discrete set of content produced to arrive all at the same time is appealing because it allows one to read from start to finish and then be done. The idea is known as completism. Those who suffer from an extreme form of completism wind up with stacks of New Yorkers and Economists and have to either unsubscribe or remain buried.
The issue is distinct from the river: the continuously fed stream of content that rolls down from the hills and through a website. Rivers attract a lot of attention, too. They are the foundation of blogging, from when it was a hobby or outlet through the current huge variation of uses.
A river tells you what’s happening now, and you, as a reader, can be the fisher and dip your net in to grab something passing by. When you’re tired, sit on the shore and eat your lunch. Wander away for a while, or for weeks. The river is contemplative for that kind of reader.
But for many people, they are a salmon in the river. They are buffeted as they try to make headway upstream. But the river never stops, and you can rarely keep in one place. You are swept back to the ocean, lost, at times.
The New Yorker is a Great Lake; The Magazine is a large pond, one that you’re told about and try to seek out; Medium is a brook with still waters and pools through which the waters pass.
Boing Boing, another partner, is a raging torrent, which has increasingly used earthen dams and large works to reshape the flow. The editors have talked publicly lately about the near-term work of separating the river of short items from the broad, wide stream of longer features. They want to serve different kinds of readers, and so do we.
It’s all a work in progress.
The platform isn’t the medium
Content platforms — the software systems that drive pushing out articles and blog posts and “Snowfall”-style features and managing user comments and the like—don’t determine what’s said, but they shape the flow of water. The design philosophy behind a platform defines what can be easily done with it. Everything not inherent in the system requires the equivalent of massive, expensive public-works projects.
Blog software was designed to push out chronologically newest-to-oldest posts in as efficient a manner as possible. Short, sweet, and fast. As WordPress and other platforms have matured into richer systems, the blogging philosophy remains enshrined.
The Magazine’s back-end and app are built around an issue, and turning its purpose to faster-moving posts, blog-like or page-like, is akin to steering a cruise ship. It’s majestic and the food is delicious and abundant, but it takes quite a while to change direction and you burn up fuel in the process. You can only pull into certain ports. And it’s only affordable to operate with full berths. The passengers may get restless, too, as you try to manuever.
Medium’s “atom,” its smallest unit, is the article or post, but Medium wasn’t designed to have a direction of flow. There’s no right way to post to it or read it. Collections, such as ours, organize contents coherently. Recommendations and other tools float some posts to the top where, in the typical power-law curve, they are seen by ever more people who recommend them to ever more people. Attention is the unit of measure here, rather than chronology (blog) or periodicity (issue).
We’re not big enough to master every form. It’s why I wanted to work with Boing Boing, which has an audience of fascinating people, pretty much every one of which could be a profile article at that site or in The Magazine. Some Happy Mutants (the collective name for Boing Boing readers) have been reading and contributing for over 10 years; some have been reading Boing Boing since its zine days, which started in 1988. I love that community and want to learn from and share with them.
Medium’s form is almost exactly what Marco created with our app: it is sleek and simple, but easy to read and share. I wanted to work with Medium because they’ve already built a tool I want to use to shape how we present the stories we want to tell.
Why subscribe, then?
The logical question is, then, why subscribe to The Magazine’s app and Web site when one can read everything on the Internet at no cost (not quite true, but seemingly nearly so), and when we’re sharing some of our work here while also publishing new stories?
Because of that modality. We don’t per se curate The Magazine: that is, we don’t find material elsewhere and link you to it or license it to make an issue. We commission new stories and produce a regularly produced unit in which they appear. We’ll continue to do that.
Our longer features, medium-form length—longer than a short story and shorter than the 5,000–30,000 words or so of a long-form story—will appear first and mostly at The Magazine. We’ll share some of our archived work here and at Boing Boing; at Medium, we’ll create shorter stories that are snappier: more nuggets and snapshots that fit Medium’s format and audience well. Some of what we write here will, in turn be shaped into longer narrative features that appear in The Magazine weeks or months later.
(More practically, a subscription gives you full access to everything we’ve ever published, access to our app for reading on iOS devices, and downloadable and emailed ebook versions of every issue with no DRM encryption. We’ll be adding more features for subscribers, too, that will help differentiate our different approaches.)
We’re here at Medium because we want to see what people want to read. That’s what Medium wants to know, too. I have no idea of what Medium’s end game is to turn an experiment into revenue. I only know that I like the path they’re taking and the risk in figuring out what works.
Coming attractions
This isn’t the end of our experiments into what people want to read and how they want to receive it.
In a couple of weeks, we’ll launch a crowdfunding campaign for a print book that collects stories from our first year of publication that piqued the most interest and that we think best exemplify what we’re about. We’ve had a request for a book for many months from people who wanted to hold in their hands (or on their tablets!) a permanent version of stories they liked.
The print version is also a test towards a quarterly print subscription. We currently produce about 130 articles a year, and the quarterly print version will likely include about half of those, intended for those who want an even more moderate pace of new things to read.
Both the annual and quarterly versions, if successful, will be available as downloadable ebooks, too, and we’ll start selling individual issues and thematic ebook collections as well.
Medium rare
This is a time of incredible turmoil for every part of the news and feature ecosystem: publishers, editors, writers, artists, photographers, and readers. It’s impossible to know what is coming next, but it’s also inevitable that the current wave of change is going to crash down and destroy and transfigure even more than it has so far.
We don’t know where we will be in six months or a year or five years. But we’re enjoying being part of figuring that out. And it’s nice to have some friends along the way.
Glenn Fleishman is the editor and publisher of The Magazine. He enjoys They Might Be Giants, sushi, and pondering the waves of time probability.
